Within the broader contours of common knowledge and vernacular medicine, my MPIWG project explores “Embryology, Cosmology, Epistemology: Visual and Textual Depictions of the Fetus in and beyond Chinese Daily-Use Handbooks.” The project focuses on the illustrated section on “Sowing Seeds” or Gestation (zhongzi men 種子們), which was a standard feature of the genre of Comprehensive Compendia of Myriad Treasures (wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書) from its inception in the sixteenth century through the 1930s. It seeks to determine when and why the sequence of the “ten months of gestation,” which dates to ancient Chinese texts, was first illustrated. It probes how these images interacted with the surrounding text in the Myriad Treasures: from poetic portraits of the fetus to herbal prescriptions for the encumbered birth mother. I then trace the itinerary of this section on embryology from the Myriad Treasures where it was featured over four centuries, backwards to its sources, forwards into new genres, outwards into Japanese and Korean works, and through later biomedical overwritings. I develop the notion of epistemic ecologies in an effort to deepen our understanding of the different processes of meaning making and worlding that both drove and arose from the re-embedding of bytes of knowledge—such as the section on “Gestation”—in new cultural and historical contexts. Ultimately the project questions why certain artefacts of knowledge traveled, with what alterations, and to what epistemic ends.
This research is part of a multiyear, international collaborative project, “Vernacular Medicine and Modes of Knowing in China: Historical and Global Contexts,” funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant (awarded in the spring of 2025). Partners on the grant include the MPIWG, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Heidelberg University, and the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. See proxy website at: https://vcmed.org/.